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Comment by stolen_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

> 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)

Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.

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It only took 200 years for 200 of those 260 languages to be lost or brought to the edge of extinction. It's at least plausible and to me quite believable that the arrival of a group with a technological advantage 4,000 years ago could have had a substantial impact on the existing languages.

The same set of languages definitely will not have survived for 60,000 years. Tribes come and go, merge and split. Outside influences bring in new words and grammatical structures. Oral tradition is a low fidelity carrier of language and culture, and easily accommodates change in language.

sure it’s plausible, but is there any linguistic evidence of it being the case? otherwise there’s very little point in discussing it

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/14/most-....

Your article doesn't provide any evidence that Pama–Nyungan languages are from India. You'd think the Wikipedia article on Dravidian wouldn't say "The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages" if there was some evidence of the language families relation.

Especially only 4,000 years ago. I’m under the impression that the culture is much much older than that. Why would it change so quickly? Especially for a people’s that are quite traditional. At least as I understand it.

I also understand that the native languages are mostly spoken and not written, are these Indian languages written?

There is compelling but rare evidence of habitation back as far at 60,000 years. But there is zero reason to assume the continent was sealed to migration at any point. In fact it was disconnected and reconnected by land bridges more than once over that period. Culture is a process not an artifact. Regarding the speed of change, tally the vocab contribution of Norman French, Anglo Saxon, Roman and Brittonic languages to modern English -- the 'place' has almost forgotten the contributions made beyond about 1,600 years ago even if there are living residents that are genetically linked to inhabitants from thousands of years before.

Australasia has not been joined to the rest of the world by land bridges for tens of millions of years. That's why so much of the fauna is strange and unusual. Humans are one of the few mammalian species that have managed to cross the deep water barriers on our own.

True, you've never been able to just walk it like you could to Tasmania. I mean millions of years ago, Australia was further south -- it's been inching north[1]. Sea levels around the last glacial maximum[2] made the distances much more 'canue-able'. I would consider that at least 'more connected', but you are correct.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/03/mind-the-gap... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-island-hopping-route-people-au...

New Guinea was until end of ice age though I believe.

Various aboriginal cultures (there isnt just one) have elements which are much older but over 300 of the ~400 languages are from one family (pama nyungyan). This family's common ancestor is traced to a region in North Australia around 5000 years ago. These languages suddenly exploded and spread across the continent at around the same time other technologies and techniques seem to change. This was around the time of the Dingo introduction and this considerable Indian introgression discussed in paper--the dingo was probably brought by these people. I may have misremembered that these languages have some relation to south indian ones, it seems this is disputed, but this is all happening around the same time. There is a lot that isn't known about Aboriginal peoples and the genetic studies once they are performed (if allowed) are likely going to show a more complex picture than the usual narrative. To the person who called me a tamil nationalist or something i can only laugh.

Linguistic displacement can occur without genetic displacement. This has happened many times in history -- usually when a society's elite are displaced by a linguistically distinct foreign elite and their language is gradually adopted down the ranks of society as people seek advancement. Many branches of Proto-Indo-European (eg. Anatolian) are thought to have spread in this manner ie. with elite but not whole-population displacement.

I wasn't aware of this Australian language family example, but it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first.

That happened in England after the Battle of Hastings. Upper crust English is still dominated by french words.

My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following: spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).

I've heard it put more crassly as "barbarian grammar with french nouns"

The only thing that got hacked to pieces more than the English peasantry during the middle ages was the English language.

That's great.

This is true but is also something there would be reason to doubt in Australian context. It seems more likely that peoples in northern australia had some contact with outsiders around the time discussed in article, got some technological advances and small degree of genetic mixing from absorbing the outsiders, and then spread out, probably helped by some new techniques. But this is just one conjecture.

I have no idea if its true or not, but it doesn't sound totally impossible. Look at how the language make up has changed over the last 300 years in north america.

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